Sermon Illustration about Meaning

Alan Loy McGinnis tells a story about a man who stood on the bank of Lake Michigan in despair. He was 32 years old, a college dropout and financially bankrupt. On the verge of throwing himself into the lake, he looked to the sky and a thought came to him: "You have no right to eliminate yourself. You do not belong to you. You belong to the universe."

Gaining strength from this thought, he stood up to life and went back to invent the geodesic dome and enlisted more than 170 patents. He became known as a mathematician, architect and poet. The man's name was Buckminster Fuller.

He was right. We all belong to the universe. Christians phrase it as "belonging to God."